That doesn't necessarily mean the dynamic sampling wasn't happening - it may mean that with the correct cardinalities the optimizer was still inclined to choose a bad plan. Regards Jonathan Lewis http://jonathanlewis.wordpress.com/all_postings Author: Oracle Core (Apress 2011) http://www.apress.com/9781430239543 ----- Original Message ----- |specify cardinality(tableA xxx) dynamic_sampling(tableB,9) | |With just dynamic sampling I get a good plan but I noticed the cardinality estimates for tableA were off, so I added the cardinality hint for tableA and the |plan went back to the previous plan when not using dynamic_sampling. -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l